Incidentally, if you have an AR-type rifle, and you chamber a cartridge and then unload the rifle, you will very often see a mark where the firing pin "kissed" the primer as the bolt slammed forward into battery.

And director Francesca Zambello kept a focus on storytelling so that the action was always clear, from the moment when the handsome captain of the guard, Narraboth, kills himself out of frustrated passion for the princess Salome to the moment when the princess, smeared with blood from the decapitated head she has just kissed, is punitively garrotted (rather than crushed by a shield) by another guardsman.